Today I went pants shopping. For me to shop for clothes is an extremely rare event, and not a happy occasion but rather one characterized by uncertainty and a kind of free-floating sorrow. I am not comfortable making the kind of dispassionate self-assessments required in the decision-making process. First, you have the overwhelming number of choices, the colorful displays, the overall feeling of commercial seduction. The whole atmosphere brings together the worst kind of consumerist madness with the insidious promise of personal transformation, even transcendence. Even level-headed people, people like me who are at times too wary of psychological manipulation, find themselves succumbing a bit to the false promises inherent in the shopping environment. The fact is that I will not be a different person, even slightly different, when I leave the store. I will not be improved, I will not have purchased for myself an opportunity to shine, to come closer to my potential, that more fully realized version of myself that a few carefully selected consumer goods can help me embody. I will more likely in fact emerge in worse condition, a person who has ratcheted down a few notches in terms of his priorities and his own most evolved feelings.

After I wandered the labyrinthine racks and displays and settled on a couple of possibilities, I entered the changing room area and selected the first available unit. This is not a happy room for me. To me this little room is a site of resignation and sadness. I despise the pitiless functionality of it, the little wooden bench, the too-low hanger holders, the large mirrors. It's like some kind of personal interrogation chamber, except that instead of being worked over under the hot lights by brutish authority figures you're left to face only yourself, which is even worse. I can never make up my mind in such rooms, which is more or less a fatal flaw in the clothes-buying process; the changing room is a decision room, that's its raison d'être. The problem is exactly that, however, the room too remorselessly demands a decision, as you stand there trying not to return the mirror's unpitying gaze, face to face with your own loathsome asymmetries and queasily hominid physicality. How can you decide in that kind of environment that a garment "looks good" on you, that it's worth the amount of money the price tag demands? Not to mention the fact that the person in such a mirror looks so grubby, compared to all the brand new, clean-smelling clothes you're surrounded by. You look seedy to yourself, everything about you is scuffed and shabby in appearance in such a changing room mirror. The decay of age, the general decrepitude that comes from merely living a normal life beyond the age of eighteen, these qualities are cruelly exposed and illuminated in the changing room situation. I always emerge from such a room convinced I am exuding some foul personal odor, some terrible biological smell that's plagued me for a lifetime, something like the whiff of failure: the failure to be preposterously young and unbelievably successful and happy.